Every Day is Sunday

During the first half of Erin & Jeff’s time in Ethiopia, it was great to share my life with them.  They walked with me to work; we went to the children’s home where I volunteer; we went out dancing with my crew; they traveled with me to the field to visit rural health centers.  They were the best guests ever and it gave me a whole new perspective on my life through having people to share it with.

Then we got on a plane and went to Arba Minch and I joined them in their life (at least for this year), adventure, travel, and getting out of my comfort zone. No one left the trip disappointed, although we did return a little more bruised and battered than we started.

One of the coolest things about living in Ethiopia is the diversity of this country. Travel north and you’ll experience history Christian churches from the 12th or 13th century in Lalibela. Travel east and you’ll experience the 4th holiest city for Muslims in Harar. Travel west and you’ll experience the birthplace of coffee (a holy place for coffee addicts like myself). And travel south and you’ll see tribes and communities that you can hardly imagine exist.  Jeff and Erin did a great job documenting the experience, so I’ll leave that to them, but I’ll just add some highlights.

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(1) Highland! Highland!  At first we thought that the kids on the side of the road were greeting us (Hi there! Hi there!) but we quickly realized that they were asking for our Highland brand bottled water.

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Wertkinborns Insert:  There were the kids who chased after our car and screamed Highland!, and then there were the kids who tried to get us to stop by doing this crazy dance by the side of the road.  Anne’s too modest to mention that she mastered the Konso dance in less than five minutes.  The dancing kids put even the late King of Pop (RIP MJ) to shame.  Even Michael would be impressed by these one-legged moves, and by how quickly Anne picked it up.    

(2) On Day 2 of our trip, Jeff managed to slice his thumb open. He calmly tells Erin that the cut himself. She grabs me to see if I have anything helpful in my backpack (I don’t, of course) and I get the 2 doctors we’re traveling with. While they apply a compression, Erin nearly passes out. Then, when the crisis had averted (I’d highly recommend traveling with 2 really cool doctors on all trips), I managed to step on a thorn that went about an inch into my foot. Sure, the kids there do it all the time, but it was still disturbing to me. When we arrived back at camp, the doctors stitched Jeff back up, and it pained me just to watch the experience. Jeff is now my hero for his ability to manage pain.

Best free clinic EVER

(3) We spent about 50 billion hours in the car (give or take) – dirty, hot, uncomfortable. In true road trip fashion, these stretches of time led to hilarious conversations. Which may be some of my favorite moments of the trip. For example, Jeff played his acapela group song for the car. Erin and I discussed (at length) termite hills. And what they resemble.

It was honestly hilarious, the stupid things you talk about with lots of time on your hands. Couldn’t have picked better travel buddies for such absurd conversation as Erin and Jeff.

Seriously, for those of you reading, if you have the chance to join Jeff and Erin on any of their adventures – this year or in the many I imagine will happen after 2009, do it! It was such a great experience and Jeff and Erin are the best travel buddies ever.

After days and days of driving, we were anxious to get out of the car and excited about exploring Jinka on foot. We were walking across the Jinka air strip (we assume they clear the cattle when a plane is about to land) when we were approached by two young boys.

Jinka Air Strip

The boys told us they were part of a soccer team that didn’t have enough balls to hold a proper practice, and they asked if we would buy them a soccer ball for about 40 Ethiopian Birr. Now, over the course of our three months in Africa we learned that one of the worst thing aid workers can do is give something away for free. The best programs ensure buy-in by the local community by requiring them to get invested in the project and raise a percentage of the necessary funds (Bomet and Kampala were the best examples we saw).

We decided to apply our recently-acquired wisdom to the boys. We told them that if they could come up with 10 Birr, we would donate the remaining 30 Birr and buy them the soccer ball. They said they’d raise the money and, true to their word, two hours later they appeared outside our guest house with money in hand.

We walked to a nearby shop and picked out a soccer ball. We thought it was strange that the price of the ball was now 50 Birr (and not 40 Birr as they had said) but we were caught up in the moment and went ahead with the purchase. The boys seemed genuinely excited.

We felt pretty good about the whole experience . . . until we re-told the story that night at dinner. Our guide Andi just shook his head.  There isn’t any soccer team and the whole thing is a scam! The cheap balls actually cost 15 Birr, and the local shop owners sell them at an inflated price to tourists. The boys get a cut of each sale and get to keep the ball. We were bamboozled! We must have had “sucker” written on our faces because a different group of boys tried to run the same scam on us the next day.

We were kicking ourselves for falling for the scam (we should know better!) until Anne passed along some of the wisdom she’s gained during her time as an international air worker: “You have to get hard and cynical to succeed in this business, but if you aren’t compassionate enough to want to buy poor kids a soccer ball then it’s time to find a new line of work.” Wise words.

That night was the final of the Champions League (FC Barcelona v. Manchester United) and so we decided to put the experience behind us and enjoy ourselves. The entire town was shutting down to watch the game, and so we joined the crowd. It wasn’t a bar (no drinks served) and the seats weren’t that comfortable (wooden benches), but it was an incredible atmosphere to watch a game.

The Ethiopians are passionate in their devotion to their favorite European football teams and we had a great time (especially Jeff) chewing chad with the locals and and erupting in cheers for each goal scored by FC Barcelona.

We were sad to leave Jinka and not excited at all about the 10 hour ride back to Arbor Minch.  Luckily there was plenty of random entertainment on the road.

It started out like your typical Wednesday.  We climbed into an SUV and started down a dirt road on our way to visit an indigenous tribe in a remote part of Ethiopia.  All of a sudden a band of naked men stepped into the middle of the road.  Now that is a little out of the ordinary.

The men formed a naked roadblock in the hope that we’d stop our car and pay them to take their picture.  But our driver/guide Andigar just leaned on the horn and didn’t slow down.  With about 100 meters to go in the STRANGEST game of chicken we’ve ever been a part of, the naked men flinched and moved quickly to the side of the road.  It all happened too quickly to get a good photo, but it is worth reporting that one of the naked men was so fat (a rarity in that part of the country) that his belly hung down well below his johnson.

After the naked brigade, we didn’t encounter any other roadblocks and were ready for the highlight of our trip – a visit to the Mursi tribe of the upper Oma Valley. 

Wild!  Those are clay plates inserted into their lower lips.  It’s an integral part of Mursi culture for women to cut the bottom lip of their daughters and, gradually over time, the girls’ lower lips are expanded using larger and larger clay plates.  By the time they are of marrying age, Mursi women can insert clay plates sometimes as large as their face!   

 Nobody knows for sure why the Mursi began this tradition.  Apparently everybody has a theory, including our guide.  Andi explained that when Arabian traders came to southern Ethiopia in the 12th and 13th centuries, it was common for them to come into tribal villages and kidnap young girls to keep as concubines or sell as slaves.  As a survival mechanism, the Mursi women began wearing plates in their lips to make themselves less desirable to the Arab invaders.  This practice morphed into a cultural tradition and has continued long after the threat from foreign traders ended.   Now Mursi women who wear the plates are deemed to be more attractive and desirable to Mursi men.

Her lower lip hangs when she takes out her plate

The whole experience was fascinating.  We learned that the Ethiopian government has officially outlawed lip-cutting, but this new law has not stopped the Mursi from continuing what they consider to be a proud tradition.  If history is any indication, the power of modernity (and the new hydroelectric dam planned by the Ethiopian government) will likely cause the Mursi to abandon their traditional way of life and their practice of wearing lip plates.  We spent most of the car ride back discussing whether this type of progress is good, bad, avoidable and/or inevitable.

Erin:  After seeing the Hamer people at the market, it was a bit of a let-down to go back into “tourist mode” for our visit to the Dasenech tribe. We were having the same experience with the Dasenech as we had with the Abore.  “Photo!  Photo! Photo!” was all I heard.

Jeff:  I was trying to figure out how to distract the Dasenech from asking me to take their picture, but I was a little tired of juggling.  One of the younger boys pointed at my Leatherman and gave me an inquisitive look, so I decided to show the kids how it worked.  It was hot out and all the kids were crowded around and I kind of lost sight of the blade as I was showing them how well my knife can whittle a stick. 

Erin:  But the problem is that Jeff has never whittled a stick before.

Jeff:  I cut my finger…and the cut was pretty deep.

Erin:  I’m checking out the inside of one of the huts – they’re cooking something and it’s getting extremely hot.  I’m feeling faint so I step outside only to hear Jeff say “Hey Erin, can you come here, please.”  As I look up, I see blood gushing down Jeff’s arm. 

Jeff:  Erin eyes bugged out of her head when she saw my hand.  I was pretty impressed at how quickly she acted.  She poured some water on the cut, then took off my sock and used it to wrap the cut.  When the blood finally stopped gushing, I asked her to go find the South African doctors we were traveling with.   

Erin:  Holy sh** I was freaked out.  I tried to stop the bleeding but I was feeling faint from the smoke and now the blood so I grabbed the first person I could find, which turns out to be Anne.

Jeff:  So Erin comes back with Anne.  I say something like, “It’s great to see you Anne, but do you think you might ask one of the doctors to come over.” 

Erin:  Jeff’s got the deep cut but I’m the one who gets lightheaded and need to sit down to keep from collapsing.  While blood is dripping off his elbow Jeff turns to me and asks me how I’m doing. Meanwhile, Anne gets the doctors.  The Wertkinborns are down for the count.

Jeff:  Our South African doctors Jodi and Adelaide come over to me, take one look at the cut, and tell me I need stitches.  They grabbed some tissue and created a compression to help stop the bleeding. 

Erin:  Amazingly, we were prepared for the situation.  For five months I’d been lugging around a medicine bag that included a suture kit, antiseptic, and bandages.  Since we were traveling with two doctors, we had everything we needed.   

Jeff: So Jodi performed surgery in the African bush.  I have to admit that getting stitches without any antithetic was very painful.  I don’t know anything about medicine but there has to be more nerves in your thumb than in most other parts of your body.  The first stitch was shockingly painful, more than I thought it would be.  My body adjusted and by the second stitch I could feel every movement of the needle and the thread as Jodi laced it through my thumb.  I was very glad when it was over, I don’t think I could have handled more than 3 stitches without any whiskey.

Erin:  Just watching made me wince, but Jeff didn’t show any pain.  Even the doctors were impressed by the way he managed the pain.  As usual, Jeff was calm and collected.  But I still had to take away his Leatherman.

The world is shrinking.  Only 100 years ago, anthropologists like Margaret Mead went to Somoa to study indigenous cultures untouched by modernity.  Now there’s a Coconuts Beach Resort in Somoa.  For better or worse, there are very few places left in the world where people live the same way they’ve been living for centuries.  One of those places is the remote Oma Valley in southern Ethiopia.

Along with our Addis host extraordinaire Anne, we made our way South (first by plane and then many, many hours in an SUV over dirt roads) to see the tribes of the Oma Valley: the Arbore, the Hamer, the Banna, and the Mursi.  We shared the car with Jodi and Adelaide, two doctors from South Africa.

We were a little worried that our trip was going to be like going to a “people zoo” where we just stood around and gawked at people who look different from us.  Our guide told us not to worry – we’d be visiting villages on market days when the tribal people naturally gather and we could interact with them, participate in the commerce, or observe from a distance. 

But there weren’t any markets being held on the day we arrived, so instead we visited the Arbore tribe in their village. 

Unfortunately, our “people zoo” concerns were proved correct on the first day.  The Arbores have become accustomed to seeing tourists, and they now insist that you give them money to take their picture.  Giving them money isn’t so bad, except that the tribal members badger you to take their picture for a fee.  It goes well beyond ordinary badgering – they grab at your elbow, tug at your shoulder and repeatedly yell “photo, photo, photo” in your face. 

This old woman wouldn't leave Anne alone until she paid for a picture

It was getting a little tense and uncomfortable in the village for all of us, and so Jeff figured he might as well try his old juggling trick to distract them.     

Apparently a crazy white guy throwing rocks to himself is not as interesting in the south of Ethiopia as it was in the north.  Jeff was able to hold the Arbores attention for about 3 minutes, and then the “photo, photo, photo” resumed.  Visiting the Arbore wasn’t great, and so we were looking forward to the next day where we would go to market day in a Hamer village.

Hamer women selling butter at the Key Afer Market

 One of the things that makes the Hamer women so distinctive is the way they color their hair with ochre.  According to our guide they mix ochre, water and binding resin, and then rub the mixture into their hair to create copper-colored tresses.  The ochre dye often drips from their hair and onto the rest of their body.

The Hamer men also indulge in elaborate hair-dressing.  They wear a clay “cap” that is painted and decorated with feathers and other ornaments. Only men who’ve made a big kill get the honor of wearing a clay cap.

You can tell a lot about a Hamer woman just by looking at her.  If she’s wearing one iron necklace, she is the first wife of her husband.  If she is wearing two necklaces, she is the second wife and so on.  After about wife 3 there isn’t any space left on their necks so they forgo them completely. Sucks to be wife four or maybe she got the best deal…hard to say.  

One of the most exciting and disturbing things we learned about the Hamer people is the coming-of-age rituals they perform.  Before he is allowed to marry, a boy must successfully complete a “cattle-jumping” ritual – he must jump across the backs of 5-6 cattle standing in a row without falling.  And all the jumping is performed in his birthday suit as a symbol of the childhood he is about to leave behind.  

The disturbing part is the role the village’s women play.  Women supporting the young boy (especially the boy’s sisters) provoke the men in the village to whip their bare backs with sticks that inflict raw open wounds and scar them for life.  The more lashings the women provoke, the more they are seen to support the boy in his quest to successfully complete the ritual.  According to our guide, the women not only welcome the lashings, but wounds are seen as beautiful and the mark of a true Hamer woman.  

Because we were there on a market day, we were able to walk around and simply observe the Hamer people going about their daily lives.  The market largely consisted of grain, cattle, and animal skins clothes, spices, and clay pots. They stopped bardering for goods just six years ago!

Later that night, we went back to the Hammer village so they could show us how to dance.  Learning the dance was easy, but what the Hammer girls didn’t tell us is that if you dance with a boy you are insinuating that you’ll shack up with him later.  SO the girls are really choosy and often ran away giggling.    

Traveling in Africa we expected to see elephants, lions, and maybe even the occasional mountain gorilla.  We certainly didn’t expect to see 400 year-old castles and be regaled with stories of African royalty.  And then we got to Gondar in the north of Ethiopia.

The story of Gondar is kind of like the story of Camelot.  In 1632, the Emperor Fasilades (yes, Ethiopia had emperors!) established Gondar as the capital of Ethiopia.  Fasilades built himself a walled palace compound complete with beautiful castle, church, and stone bridges over protective moats.

Unlike King Arthur and Guinevere - Fasilades and his successors (his son Yohannes I, his grandson Iyasu the Great, his great-grandson Tekle Haymonot, and his great-great daughter-in-law Zewditu) were real! Over a span of 236 years, each of these emperors added castles within the original walled compound and cumulatively built 44 churches all around Gondar.

As we walked around admiring the castles, we were approached by Anna Little, a journalist and videographer who works for the Associated Press.  She needed some tourists for her piece on Gondar, and so we volunteered to be interviewed about our impressions of the place.  We really wished we had showered and shaved but I guess the grungy backpacker look is authentic.  

We had drinks with Anna after the “shoot” and learned about the really cool work she does all over Ethiopia (http://www.annalittle.com/).  We’re still waiting to see if the footage surfaces anywhere – we’ll post about it if we hear anything ; )   

While we were touring around, Anne Batchelder was making her way to Gondar to do some work on behalf of the Clinton Foundation.  Anne let us tag along for a visit to a local health center about two hours outside Gondar.  We toured the facilities and learned about the different ways that this rural health center was meeting the challenges of serving an impoverished population. 

Breakroom for the nurses

After touring the incredible churches at Lalibela, we headed out to the Ethiopian highlands for a three-day trek.  By day, we trekked through villages and walked along escarpments with 3,000 foot drops.  By night, we drank warm beers and told stories around the fire with our new friends from the UK (Gabe and Richard were an impressive comedy duo) and slept in Tukols in local villages. 

We spent the night in the second Tukol -- the first Tukol in the picture is the outhouse

Women carrying water from river to their tukols

The group

Jeff:  It was our second day of the hike when we came across about 300 villagers working on irrigation channels in the fields.  I guessed that they didn’t have too much experience with white people because as soon as they saw us they stopped their work and stared at us.  Because of the language barrier, we couldn’t do anything but stare back.  Our staring contest was getting a little awkward, and so I did the only thing I could think of to break the ice: I picked up three rocks and started to juggle.  The kids in the group rushed to the front and started oohing and aahing.  I think it was the first time they had seen anyone juggling.

Erin: The kids may have been oohing and aahing, but the adults were just staring in bewilderment.  The look on their faces seemed to say “why is that crazy feringie throwing rocks in the air?”  When he finished juggling everyone stood there silent until somebody started clapping and eventually they all broke out into applause.  The kids walked with us for an hour waiting for Jeff to juggle some more.

Jeff:  And I did juggle until my hands were full of cuts from the rocks.  Hey, I didn’t mind being the center of attention for a while.  After all, it was my birthday!

Erin: So Jeff’s not big on celebrating his birthday but I wanted to do something fun.  My options were a bit limited by the fact that we were staying in villages without electricity or running water.  I spoke with some of the locals about it, and they all agreed on the best gift a man could get on his birthday.  So I bought Jeff a SHEEP!

Jeff:  I was sitting on a bench overlooking the valleys reading my book when all of a sudden this guy from the village walks up to me and presents me with a sheep.  It took me a second to realize that the sheep was actually for me.  I thought briefly about sending it to the States for my parents to keep until we got back, but ultimately we decided to have it for dinner.

Erin: I was genuinely excited about buying Jeff a sheep but there was NO way I was watching them kill the poor thing.

Jeff:  It was cool watching the locals slaughter, skin, and carve the meat from the sheep.  When you only shop in supermarkets and buy meat in cellophane, it’s easy to forget that meat actually comes from a living, breathing animal.  It made me appreciate the strong connection that local people have with their animals.   

Erin:  It was disgusting.  I need more degrees of separation from my food.

Jeff:  Every part of the sheep had a purpose.  After they removed all the meat, they were careful to clear the intestines so they could use them for casings.  In an unforgettable exchange, Gabe asks, “What is he doing?”  Richard replies in his erudite British monotone, “Well, it appears he’s blowing in its arse to make an air sausage.”

Erin:  When it was all finished. I looked at all the meat (in the bowl) and realized that this sheep would feed about 25-30 people.  That’s a whole lot of mutton for just 6 trekkers.  So we asked our guide to invite some of the villagers to share in the meal.

Jeff:  It was great to have the villagers come to the party and share in the feast.  They were so grateful for the rare treat that they came up to me individually to wish me a happy birthday.  Two of the villagers brought a bamboo flute and drum and we stayed up late singing and learning how to shoulder-dance in the Ethiopian style.  

Erin: The sheep was by far our best purchase of the trip – the party was fun and the food deeelicious.

Jeff: It was definitely one of my most memorable birthdays.

About 700 years ago, King Lalibela of Ethiopia made the pilgrimage from his hometown to Jerusalem with a bunch of his Orthodox Christian buddies.  Unfortunately, the Muslims (who captured Jerusalem in the late 12th century) made the journey difficult for the pilgrims.  So he did what any enterprising young King would do: he built his own Jerusalem.

King Lailibela built replicas of tombs found in Jerusalem, built churches in the style of old Jerusalem churches, and named everything in the town after some structure he saw in Jerusalem.  Even the town’s river named after the River Jordan.  Holy doppelganger!

What makes the churches at Lalibela so amazing is that they were all carved out of rock.  It’s so unbelievable its worth repeating: entire churches were carved out of a SINGLE block of rock.  They weren’t so much constructed – they were EXCAVATED from the top down.

Incredible doesn’t really cover it – the churches seem otherworldly in scale, workmanship and concept.  Stonehenge eat your heart out. 

The most impressive of the 11 rock-hewn churches is the church of St. George.  The structure was cut 40 feet underground, yet the roof is a precision piece of architecture in the shape of a Greek cross. 

Lalibela only recently got electricity, has few cars, no gas stations, and no paved streets.  Everyone is dressed in white and women cover their heads. Much like Muslims, these orthodox Christians, have calls to prayer several times a day. Walking around Lalibela, we felt as though we had been transported back to biblical times.

Locals gathering for prayer

When I was leaving the ONE Campaign (to work for an NGO in Nigeria), Erin told me about this crazy plan she and Jeff had to spend a year traveling the world, while seeing the poverty-fighting work we’d been advocating for at ONE.  Since it was still a distant plan, I wondered if they would be able to pull it off.  It’s not easy to pick up and leave the country.

Well, the dream is being realized and it’s really awesome.  And I was lucky enough to be along their path to adventure, travel and greatness.  A friend back in the States was just telling me about a wedding in which the couple pledged to live their lives like they’re always on vacation – they “will promise to help each other live lives that are sort of like being on vacation—all the time.   Lives where absolutely everything is worthy of notice.  Lives where mundane things are exciting, and questions get asked. “  Now this is Erin and Jeff’s lives and I cannot imagine a much more inspiring way of living.

Since I am a guest, I suppose I should introduce myself.  I’m Anne.  I’m an Aries from Nebraska.  I worked with Erin at ONE.  And now I live in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and work at the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative in Pediatrics. 

Erin and Jeff were planning on coming to Ethiopia before I was, so they were immediately scheduled as my first visitors and I started counting down the days until I had friends in town about a week into my time here.

One of the things I was most excited to introduce Erin and Jeff to in Addis was the Artists for Charity Children’s Home (artistsforcharity.org), which houses 16 HIV+ orphans in one of the best communities I’ve ever experienced.  More than anything in Addis, this home gives me hope and I wanted to share that with Erin and Jeff.  So, I gave them a map and my friend (the home’s founder)’s phone number and sent them via minibus to experience it.   

For story time, Jeff told the best rendition of the Tinchel and the Enshilalit (in English, the Tortoise and the Hare) that I’ve ever heard (favorite part, the rabbit drinking too much carrot juice).  The kids loved it.

Little did Jeff know, the following weekend, Erin, the kids, and I were planning him his 62nd birthday party (yes, a few kids guessed that he was 62).  We got Cokes, Fanta and cake for everyone.  Before we arrived, the kids had made hilarious cards for Jeff – most included pictures of princesses or declarations of love.  There may not have been electricity, but I hope it was a memorable birthday party. 

In addition to Erin and Jeff helping out with the kids, I wanted to at least show them a good time.  If you want to find a good friends and a dance party, Addis is the place to go.  We started off at Champions, where my cheese toast mysteriously disappeared.  After talking a lot of smack, Jeff and Alif battled it out in a push up contest (not for my cheese toast, although I wish they would have). 

The night wouldn’t be complete without some music and dancing, so we went to Alize, a fantastic jazz club and then Illusion for some late night dancing.  The pictures demonstrate it better than words, but it was ridiculously fun.

Needless to say, I was grateful to be part of the adventure of Erin and Jeff.  They kept talking about a jaunt to the South and after a little effective lobbying, I was convinced to skip out on work and join them.  More to come…

It all started on a bungee cord in New Zealand.   We were in the south of New Zealand on our honeymoon when we decided to go bungee-jumping in a canyon.  When it was Jeff’s turn to take the plunge, he jumped off the ledge without any hesitation.  The problem was he changed his mind about half way down.  Screaming bloody murder and grabbing for the rope was not exactly how he pictured his first bungee jump.

Upset with his first jump, he quickly climbed the canyon for a second jump — this time he was going to do it right.  But the Kiwi running the jump had other ideas and decided to play a joke on him.  The operator pretended to forget how to fasten the straps, and just as Jeff was about to jump off the ledge, the operator said “Oops.”  This time Jeff REALLY thought he was going to die.  After two jumps the whole experience was a bit of a let down.

Fast forward three years.  We’re in a town in Uganda called Jinja to do some white-water rafting.  We signed on with a company called “Adrift” (in spite of its ominous name) to take us rafting down the Nile river.   Our rafting guide, a guy from McLean Virginia named Rooster, took us through some pretty gnarly Class 4 and Class 5 rapids.

After rafting we went to grab beers at a bar on the banks of the Nile.  The main attraction at the bar was watching the people jump off the bungee platform next door.  As if white-water rafting were not enough excitement for the day…

Bungee Platform Overlooking the Nile River

Jeff was determined to avenge his New Zealand experience.  He walked to the edge, took a deep breath, and made a perfect swan dive off the ledge.  It was glorious and sweet revenge.

Jeff didn’t have much time to gloat about his jump, because he was quickly outdone by the next jumper….a woman who jumped NAKED.  After stripping off her clothes, she stood on the platform for awhile egging on the crowd.  Needless to say, everyone at the bar gave her a perfect score.